I just bought a new battery for my laptop, and for some reason I decided to read the single-page instruction manual it came with. I learned:

Never throw the battery pack into fire, as that could cause the battery pack to explode.

Never short-circuit the main battery pack by either accidentally or intentionally bringing the terminals in contact with another metal object. This could cause personal injury or a fire, and could also damage the battery pack.

Never hammer a nail into the battery pack.

Never hit a hammer on the battery pack.

You know someone, somewhere has done each one of these things. Possibly my son.

What I want to know is…why?

Why would you want to throw a laptop battery into a fire? Hit it with a hammer or pound a nail into it? The only reason I can think of is to find out what happens. Personally, I can’t imagine anything good coming from those actions, but that’s just me. I’m pretty cautious about experimentation.

But thankfully, not everyone is like me. We need people who are curious and test boundaries, or we’d never have inventions like the laptop and its battery-that-shouldn’t-be-hammered. People who step outside their comfort zones to try experiments the average person wouldn’t dream of have made the world an immeasurably better place, often at great cost to themselves. I’m grateful for the men and women who want to find out what happens. (All I ask is that they pause for a moment to ask themselves what could go wrong, and how they’re going to cope if it does.)

Once again, I guess people can be divided into two categories: Those who put their laptop batteries in their computers and those who come at them with a hammer. Which one are you?

Jewel-toned fruits.

Fireworks.

Flip flops.

Baseball.

Fresh herbs.

Ice cream.

Cotton-ball clouds in cobalt skies…

July is really and truly summer. There’s no school (both June and August contain a few days of school where we live). Summer weather patterns set in and we get thunderstorms nearly every afternoon. I love to hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, watch the skies darken, hear the pounding rain. Then sun again. Sometimes we get “sunshowers”—rain and sunshine at the same time.

In July, we slow down. After all, it’s too hot and humid to do much of anything but sit. Grab a cool glass of something to drink, put your feet up and chill—usually with a good book. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Think I’ll do that this weekend…

Every month, every season has its own pleasures. Though I like to complain about the heat and humidity, just this once I’m going to shut up and appreciate what July has to offer.

What are your favorite July pleasures?

There are thousands upon thousands of poems about love, many of them using predictable words, predictable rhymes. Ho-hum. But here the Illinois poet Lisel Mueller talks about love in a totally fresh and new way, in terms of table salt. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Love Like Salt

It lies in our hands in crystals

too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet

without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine

we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies

in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table

talking of holidays and the sea.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

My husband laughs at me because I read a lot of books about getting organized. After 24 years of being married, living in seven different domiciles of my own, moving cross country, and running our household more or less successfully, he figures I should have it all down pat. What’s funny about this is he’s often not happy with the level of cleanliness and organization in our household. (I suppose he thinks I should put down the book and pick up a broom. And perhaps he's right.)  Now, I believe I am a basically organized person, but sometimes the complexity of life and the sheer number of different activities and projects I need and want to do overwhelm me. I’m always on the lookout for something that will make my life run more smoothly with less mess.

With that in mind, I picked up David Allen’s Getting Things Done, mentioned briefly here. This is not a book focused on physically decluttering your house or workplace, but rather one that focuses on setting up a system for getting all your projects, both large and small, corralled in such a way that you clearly see what the next step is for each one, and nothing gets lost in the shuffle. I’ve found it helpful and have been trying to put the principles into practice.

Enter the label maker.

I’ve always resisted a label maker before, feeling like it was an unnecessary purchase, one that would end up adding to the clutter in my life. And that may still turn out to be true, but in the meantime I’m using it to put my files in order, both personal and professional. Before I take the time to print a label, I make sure whatever’s in that file is really something I need or want to keep—is it label worthy? It’s been an excellent way to purge files and simplify the giant wads of paper I tend to accumulate. (Allen isn’t the only one to recommend a label maker. See here and here.)

Despite what my husband thinks, I have not “read every organization book known to man.” If you type “getting organized” in Amazon.com’s search bar you’ll get 5,385 results in books alone and I’ve only read a small fraction of them! I keep reading because each getting organized book provides one more little piece of the having-a-beautiful life puzzle. I do not think the label maker, or any one gadget or program, is going to magically organize my life. My real goal for getting better organized is to have my family life run smoothly and have time to pursue and get better at my many hobbies and interests. Until I feel like I've got a handle on it all, I'll continue to read about and try new systems. (Next up: Organizing for the Creative Person.) 

What’s one thing you do to keep your life running smoothly?

Have you ever opened a library or second-hand book to find a trace of a previous reader in a left-behind bookmark? I love it when I come across someone’s marker—it feels like a tiny connection made between me and another presumably like-minded reader.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. I just finished a fascinating little book, ForgottenBookmarks: A Bookseller’s Collection of Odd Things Lost Between the Pages, by Michael Popek.

Popek, who serves as manager of his family’s used-book business, loves his most important task: buying and sorting books. (Lucky!) As he wrote in the introduction, “What I found is that I loved the fact that I could come across nearly anything: a moldy copy of Ulysses, a Victorian-era scrapbook filled with trade cards, a first edition of Steinbeck. This treasure hunt still remains my favorite part of bookselling and led directly to my fascination with forgotten bookmarks.” Popek aptly terms the left-behind page markers “treasures within treasures.” Collecting this ephemera became an unlikely passion for Popek who was surprised to find how interested others were in this unusual hobby. He started his blog forgottenbookmarks.com in 2007 and the book followed from there.

Each spread in Forgotten Bookmarks shows a picture of the marker left behind as well as the cover of the book in which it was found. Popek’s collection includes everything from four-leaf clovers to recipes, postcards, letters (some heart-breaking), drawings, ticket stubs, photos, baseball cards, unused cap gun caps, and a few more unusual items.

Collecting bookmarks is one of my simple pleasures, and though I have plenty of them, I still find myself shoving whatever is to hand into my books to mark my place until I can put in a “real” one. I also have a few books that I like to refer back to from time to time, and I’ve left markers other than bookmarks in some of them. A quick scan of my shelves and I find I’ve used the following to mark my place: a small notebook page with two web addresses I want to check out, a “Non Sequitur” comic strip, a publishing house order form, a page torn from a page-a-day calendar, and a strip of paper with a typed writing quote (“In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway”—Juno Diaz). I usually make sure I flip through any books I’m returning to the library or trading/donating for anything left behind, but now I’m reconsidering. I might just leave something in the next book I get rid of, as a way of saying hello to the next reader who picks it up.

Here are a few quotes in honor of that birthday. Hope you have a festive 4^th!

“America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact—the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality.”—Adlai Stevenson

 “How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.”—Paul Sweeney

 “Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.”—Louis D. Brandeis